GLOSSARY

activity dependence For critical realists, social structures are activity-dependent if they exist only by virtue of the activity of individuals.

actor-network theory An approach to understanding scientific practice based on close observation of laboratory practice, emphasizing active participation of objects, instruments, materials and so on in the construction of scientific knowledge.

affective action A Weberian category: action based on emotion - a form of meaningful social action but not fully rational. See also traditional action; value-oriented action; instrumental action.

bridge principle For positivists, a statement defining a theoretical concept with an observable and measurable phenomenon.

causal adequacy A Weberian category: an explanation is adequate on the level of cause if a similar situation can be found in which the proposed cause is absent, and the suggested effect does not occur. See also meaning adequacy.

closed system For critical realists, a situation where the operation of a causal mechanism can be studied independently of external influences. Closed systems are rare in nature, and scientific experiments are attempts to create them artificially. See also open system.

cognitive interest Habermas posits three ‘cognitive interests’ which human beings share in their search for knowledge: the technical, the practical and the emancipatory.

communicative rationality For Habermas, the sort of rationality involved in open-ended argument where people seek to understand each other rather than persuade each other to do something. It offers a standard by which societies can be judged and criticized. This involves communicative speech acts: statements aimed at understanding and being understood. See also functional rationality; ideal speech situation; instrumental rationality; performative speech acts.

concept dependence For Bhaskar, social structures are concept-dependent if they are maintained only by virtue of agents having some concept of what they are doing.

confirmation(ism) See testability.

consensus theory of ethics The view that ethical judgements are arrived at through communicative rationality.

constructionism, constructivism A range of approaches which treat what are commonly thought of as independent, real objects as social or cultural ‘constructs’. Some constructionists extend this approach to the natural world.

context of discovery The processes, including thought processes, involved in the creation or invention of new scientific ideas or hypotheses. There are arguments about whether these processes are or are not rational.

context of justification The processes involved in testing and evaluating an idea, theory or hypothesis once it has been advanced. See context of discovery.

conventionalism The view that currently accepted scientific beliefs are the outcome of negotiated decisions and conventions. It is associated with relativism and the strong programme in the sociology of science.

critical realism An approach to the philosophy of both natural and social science. It argues that there is a world independent of our beliefs about it, and that both natural and social sciences are concerned with investigating underlying structures.

deconstruction A post-structuralist concept most closely associated with Derrida; it refers to the systematic analysis of texts to show how they ‘construct’ their object and give the impression that they refer to some definite ‘presence’ - an external reality, or an unquestionable foundation of knowledge.

deduction Deductive arguments are ones in which the conclusion drawn follows with necessity from the premisses.

dialectics, the dialectic A way of thinking commonly associated with Hegel and Marx. The Hegelian version suggests that philosophy develops through argument and contradiction towards a totalizing knowledge of the world. For Marx this became a process by which societies develop towards communism.

dualism A tendency to divide the world into binary opposites: reason and emotion, culture and nature, body and mind and so on.

eco-feminism A feminist position which argues that women, because of their biological nature, psychological development or place in the division of labour are closer to nature, and better placed than men to defend it from patriarchal exploitation. It is closely related to feminist standpoint epistemology.

emancipatory interest The third of Habermas’s cognitive interests. This is the human interest in clearing away misunderstandings and systematic distortions in our knowledge of the world and our relations with each other.

emergence, emergent power, emergent property When elements are combined together into more complex entities, the latter often have properties which are qualitatively distinct from those of the original elements. This is known as ‘emergence’, and the properties which ‘emerge’ in this way are ‘emergent properties’, or ‘powers’ - a new level of organization.

empiricism A very broad term, designating those approaches to epistemology which give a central place to experience in the acquisition and testing of knowledge.

Enlightenment, the The period roughly covering the eighteenth century in Western Europe during which modern philosophy and science - including the social sciences - emerged.

epistemes A Foucauldian concept: an episteme is the underlying structure of a discourse, the fundamental concepts within which all thinking in particular period is determined.

epistemological break A term used in the French tradition of historical epistemology to refer to the process of radical transformation of the conceptual framework of a discipline or field of knowledge through which it first emerges as a science. See also scientific revolutions.

epistemology The philosophical enquiry into the nature and scope of human knowledge, concerned with distinguishing knowledge from belief, prejudice and so on. It is characteristically concerned with developing criteria by which to distinguish genuine knowledge from mere belief, prejudice or faith.

explanatory critique A concept used by some critical realists to emphasize the close logical connection between some forms of social explanation and the adoption of a critical, normative standpoint in relation to the phenomenon explained.

explanatory and observational understanding Weberian categories: observational understanding refers to the immediate grasp of what the observed person is doing, and explanatory understanding grasps the reasons and or intentions involved in the action.

falsification(ism) See testability.

functionalism A view of society as a collection of parts, the existence of each of which supports the others; extreme forms of functionalist explanation would explain the existence of a social institution by the function it fulfils for other institutions. Functionalism is a form of holism.

functional rationality A concept from Habermas, referring to a form of instrumental rationality which works to maintain the social system and colonize the life-world, that area of life where decisions are reached through communicative rationality.

hermeneutics/hermeneutic circle Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation and understanding, originating in the interpretation of sacred text. As with dialectical thought, the whole is important and the process of thinking is seen as moving from the part to the whole and back again.

holism The explanation of social phenomena by means of the social whole rather than the individual.

hyperreality Baudrillards description of the post-modern world, where, he argues, reality disappears and we are subjected to increasingly rapid copies of copies of copies.

idealism In philosophy it usually refers to a position in ontology, according to which the (ultimate) nature of reality is held to be ‘ideal’, or ‘spiritual’, the material world being a misleading set of ‘appearances’. There is an extended use in social theory to refer to those approaches which give the primary role in explaining social life to consciousness, culture or ‘discourse’.

ideal speech situation Habermas’s ideal of a rational, democratic society where everybody has equal access to democratic debate and relevant information and everybody is listened to. A utopian standard by which existing societies can be judged.

ideal type Weber’s central methodological concept: a rational reconstruction of a social phenomenon or process which can then be compared with the empirical reality.

ideology In its contemporary usage, ‘ideology’ refers to a systematically distorted set of ideas about reality; the ideas are distorted to favour a particular social class or group. Althusser employs the term as an opposite to ‘science’. Predominantly used in Marxist traditions.

individualism The attempt to explain social phenomena by the actions of individuals - usually opposed to holism.

induction A form of argument which assumes from past evidence of regular associations that such associations will continue into the future. This is not logically necessary, although we tend to assume that it is.

instrumentalism See theory.

instrumental rationality/action A way of describing Weber’s ‘rational action oriented to practical goals’. An important idea in the development of economics. It is used critically by the Frankfurt School theorists to point to that dimension of Enlightenment thought which entails the domination of nature and human beings.

interpretivism A name given to those approaches that concentrate on the interpretation of human actions and cultural products.

intertextuality A concept originating with Derrida. It refers to the way texts constantly rely on and draw on each other, and points to the absence of any ‘original’ or ‘definitive’ text.

intransitive dimension A technical term in critical realist philosophy, used to refer to the real objects of scientific knowledge, which are held to exist and act independently of our beliefs about them.

language game A concept developed from Wittgenstein’s work describing a language (and by extension a culture) as a game governed by a set of rules.

langue/parole The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between the ‘langue’, the underlying structure of a language, which was the object of the science of linguistics, and ‘parole’ - individual speech acts which are too variable to be studied by a science. See also structuralism.

laws (scientific) For empiricism, laws are regular event sequences, or ‘constant conjunctions’. Difficulties with this view led to Bhaskar’s critical realist account of scientific laws as ‘tendencies’ of causal mechanisms - which may or may not be expressed in the form of observable regularities.

life-world A term used by phenomenologists to describe the flow of experience out of which consciousness constructs identifiable objects; a term taken over by Habermas to describe the area of life dominated by communicative rationality as opposed to that dominated by the social system and functional rationality.

logic In philosophy, this is the study and classification of the argument-forms through which valid inferences can be made from premisses. Logic is not concerned directly with the truth or falsity of statements, but rather with the relationships between them. One way of summarizing this is to say that logic is about the rules for the correct use of the word ‘therefore’. See also deduction; induction; retroduction; transcendental arguments.

logocentrism A term coined by the post-modernist philosopher Derrida to describe the reliance of Western philosophy on Logos - the power of logical, rational argument. See also phonocentrism.

materialism In philosophy materialism is a position in ontology, according to which the (ultimate) nature of the world is physical, or material; mental life is understood as an emergent property arising from matter in complex combinations.

meaning adequacy For Weber, an explanation is adequate if it makes sense - if it is rational according to the standards of the culture in which it takes place, if it is a believable story.

meaningful action/meaningful social action For Weber, the proper object of sociology: meaningful action is action to which the actor attaches a meaning. Meaningful social action is meaningful action directed to other individuals.

meta-narrative A term employed by Lyotard to identify totalizing or general theories which he believes are no longer possible in the post-modern world, where modern information technology means that all accounts of the world are challenged and relative.

metaphysics The most ambitious branch of philosophy, concerned with giving a systematic reconstruction of the totality of human knowledge, on firm foundations.

narratives The idea that human beings are storytelling animals and make sense of their lives in narrative form has long been present in the interpretive traditions; in this text we find it emphasized in the work of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and the psychologist Jerome Bruner.

naturalism There are, in philosophy, (at least!) three quite distinct meanings given to this term. First, in moral philosophy, naturalism means that a moral judgement can be deduced from factual statements (see explanatory critique). The most common philosophical view is, on this issue, anti-naturalist. Second, the term can be used to refer to those approaches to the social sciences that model themselves on the natural sciences. The third philosophical use of the term is to characterize views of human nature and society which situate them within ‘nature’, broadly understood, rather than in opposition to it. Darwinian evolutionary views, for example, represent humans as one evolved primate mammalian species among many.

normal science See scientific revolution.

object relations psychology A psychoanalytic approach which gives priority to the internalization of early social relations rather than drives such as sexuality.

ontological individualism The position, held by Max Weber, that only individuals exist in the world, not societies or social classes or other collective entities. Weber held that if people believed that societies existed and acted accordingly then we could treat them as if they existed, but not all ontological individualists would go this far.

ontology A general theory about what kinds of things or substances there are in the world, usually presented as one aspect of a metaphysical system. A more modest use of the term refers to the range of entities and relations acknowledged within a particular field of knowledge or scientific specialism.

open system In critical realist philosophy, used to characterize the (usual) state of affairs when a plurality of causal mechanisms interact with each other. See also closed system.

paradigm For Thomas Kuhn, the framework of a shared scientific theory and shared common­sense beliefs about scientific practice that is necessary for a science to come into existence. See also scientific revolution.

paradigm/syntagm The axis along which Ferdinand de Saussure analysed the structure oflanguage. The syntagm refers to the rules which stipulate which sign can follow which - the syntagmatic chain. The paradigm or paradigmatic chain refers to rules which govern which signs can substitute for which in the same place in the syntagmatic chain. See also sign; structuralism.

perfect market A model posited by economists which assumes that everybody on the market has a perfect knowledge of market conditions, a scale of personal preferences, and can make rational decisions to realize those preferences.

performative speech acts Habermas opposes performative speech acts intended to persuade somebody to do something to communicative speech acts which aim to achieve understanding. phenomenological reduction From Husserl - the act of ‘bracketing off' what we know about something and describing the acts of consciousness by means of which we come to know it.

phonocentrism From Derrida - used to describe the priority given to the spoken as opposed to the written in Western philosophy. See also logocentrism.

post-modernism A label originating from the arts; some would claim that it is a form of contemporary society, and it is debatable whether there could be a post-modern philosophy since post-modernists deny the possibility or usefulness of meta-narratives. Post-modernism emphasizes difference, fragmentation, change, pastiche, the irrational.

post-structuralism In terms ofemphasis on fragmentation, difference and so on, post-structuralism is similar to post-modernism, but it has a rather firmer philosophical background in that it develops from a critique of Western philosophy, and therefore despite itself, shares its concerns. It condemns the logocentrism and phonocentrism of Western philosophy - the search for firm foundations to knowledge.

pragmatism A philosophy developed in America in which knowledge-claims are seen as attached to actions - crudely, what is right is what works.

problematic Term used in historical epistemology to characterize the way the concepts making up a scientific approach or tradition are interlinked with one another, and define what questions can be asked, what objects can be seen, and which rendered unaskable or ‘invisible’. See also epistemological break; epistemological obstacle.

rational choice theory A social theory that assumes that social phenomena can be understood through the rational choices of individuals. See also ontological individualism; instrumental rationality; perfect market.

rationalism An epistemological position which argues that knowledge can be established through the use of human reason.

realism This term has an immensely complex array of common-sense and philosophical uses. In this book we mean the view that (some of) the things about which we have beliefs are independent of those beliefs and are, in principle, knowable.

reflexivity Arguably a characteristic of all conscious beings, the ability to take oneself as an object of knowledge, or ‘reflection’.

relativism At its crudest, the belief that all points of view are context-dependent and of equal worth - there are no context-independent criteria by means of which we can judge between different points of view.

retroduction A form of inferential argument which starts with some phenomenon, or pattern, and poses the question ‘What sort of process, mechanism, agency, and so on, if it existed, would have this phenomenon as its consequence?’ The conclusions are not logically necessary, but it offers a rational process for devising candidate explanations. See also induction.

rules, rule-following Peter Winch takes Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language as the basis of his argument that cultures, like languages, can be seen as sets of rules and that the social scientist’s job is to elaborate these rules and the ways in which they are followed. The notion of implicit rules is also central to ethnomethodology, and the sociology of Anthony Giddens. Wittgenstein is a major figure in the linguistic turn of twentieth-century philosophy.

scientific revolution Thomas Kuhn uses the term to refer to a fundamental transformation in accepted scientific belief and theory (see paradigm). This becomes the framework for future research, setting the issues to be investigated. Kuhn calls this ‘normal science' and sees it as a form of puzzle-solving. The failure to solve puzzles can lead to another revolution and a new paradigm.

sign; signifier/signified Ferdinand de Saussure analysed language as a structure of signs. A sign consists of a signifier - the noise or mark on a piece of paper, a physical element and a concept - to which the physical element is attacked. The sign does not refer to an object but to an idea, and gains its meaning from its relationship to other signs. Saussure is a major figure in the linguistic turn of twentieth-century philosophy.

standpoint epistemology The argument that some social positions can produce a more adequate form of knowledge than others. Used by Marxists about the proletariat and more recently by feminists. See also epistemology.

strong programme in the sociology of science An approach which seeks sociological explanations of beliefs quite independently of their supposed truth or falsity.

structuralism A movement which arose across the social sciences and philosophy during the 1960s. Science was seen in terms of identifying the underlying structures of the phenomena under study.

symbolic interactionism An approach on the borders of sociology and social psychology which is based on pragmatic philosophy. See also pragmatism.

tacit knowledge Implicit knowledge of the rules of social life. This knowledge cannot always be made explicit. See also rules, rule-following.

testability The various empiricist and most realist approaches to epistemology share the view that knowledge-claims should be open to correction. Many see rational argument as part of this, but some put greater emphasis on empirical testability. Some emphasize supporting evidence (the confirmationists), but the truth of a statement can never be established conclusively this way (see induction). This gave rise to the falsificationist argument: we can't prove conclusively that something is right, but we can prove that it is wrong. A scientific statement is defined by its testability.

theory The attempt to explain phenomena by going beyond our common-sense, everyday explanations, and beyond our immediate sense experience.

traditional action One of Weber's categories of rational action - action based on tradition. In fact it is not a very rational form of action.

transcendental argument A deductive argument in which the premisses are the description of some activity and the conclusion is a statement about what must be the case for the activity to take place. A form of argument used by critical realists. See also deduction.

transformational model of social action Bhaskar's view that social structures and individual agency are mutually dependent, but should not be confused with each other, or run together. Social action is possible only by virtue of the existence of social structures, but social structures likewise persist only by virtue of the actions of individuals. In general, individual actors reproduce or transform social structures, but this is not necessarily, or even usually, their purpose in acting.

transitive dimension In critical realist philosophy, those features of human agents, their social practices and conceptual means which are involved in the production of knowledge, by contrast with the ‘objects' about which knowledge is sought. See also intransitive dimension.

understanding, observational and explanatory understanding Weber's concepts - social scientists should aim at an explanatory understanding of human action; an observational understanding is a grasp of what the actor is doing, while the explanatory understanding grasps why the actor is doing it.

value freedom Weber argued that a value-free sociology was possible, but only within certain limits. The social scientist is bound by the values of his or her culture and historical period and by his or her commitment to the values of social science. See also value-oriented action.

value-oriented action Another of Weber's types of rational action. The value choice itself is not rational, but once the choice is made the actions taken in pursuit of the value are rational.

verstehen The German word for understanding; sometimes mistakenly translated as empathy; it involves a grasp of the language and culture of the actor being studied.